Articles

Jason Davis

The Hubble Space Telescope captured a series of images showing Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) plunging toward the sun.

A.J.S. Rayl

The Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission celebrated its 10th anniversary of leaving Earth in June, as Opportunity continued the sprint to its next winter haven at Endeavour Crater.

Marc Rayman

The indefatigable Dawn spacecraft is continuing its extraordinary interplanetary flight on behalf of inquisitive creatures on distant Earth. Progressing ever farther from Vesta, the rocky and rugged world it so recently explored, the ship is making good progress toward its second port of call, dwarf planet Ceres.

Mat Kaplan

The Planetary Science Institute's Amanda Hendrix is the guest for our July 1 episode. She finds water in the least likely places, including Luna.

Bill Dunford

An

Jason Davis

IRIS, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph spacecraft, was launched from Orbital Science Corporation's Stargazer carrier aircraft over the Pacific Ocean at 7:27 p.m PDT.

Emily Lakdawalla

It had never occurred to me to think about geostationary satellites in Mars orbit before reading a new paper by Juan Silva and Pilar Romero. The paper shows that it takes a lot more work to maintain a stationary orbit at an arbitrary longitude at Mars than it does at Earth.

Bill Dunford

Meet some worlds that were nearly shattered, literally.

Alessondra Springmann

Arecibo Observatory is known for its 1000-foot diameter telescope and its appearances in Goldeneye and Contact. Aside from battling Bond villains and driving red diesel Jeeps around the telescope (grousing at the site director about the funding status of projects is optional), several hundred hours a year of telescope time at Arecibo go toward radar studies of asteroids.

Jason Davis

Astrophotographer Thierry Legault captured a striking image set of Chinese spacecraft Tiangong 1 and Shenzhou 10 transiting the Sun.

Emily Lakdawalla

A few weeks ago, a press release from the Opportunity mission celebrated Opportunity's surpassing of the previous NASA off-world driving record. That record was set in December 1972 by the Apollo 17 astronauts aboard their Lunar Roving Vehicle. They seem very close to Lunokhod 2's stated 37-kilometer driving record, but hold your horses -- we now know Lunokhod went longer than we thought.

Emily Lakdawalla

ESA celebrated the tenth anniversary of Mars Express' launch with a several-day science meeting during which they issued lots of press releases and numerous spectacular photos. My favorite of them all is this enormous image of Kasei Valles on Mars.

Bill Dunford

From far away, or from so near you could almost touch it, the moon is beautiful.

Emily Lakdawalla

The awesome LEGO Curiosity rover designed by Stephen Pakbaz is going to go into production!

Emily Lakdawalla

This is extremely good news: after more than a year of analysis, the New Horizons mission and NASA have concluded and agreed that New Horizons' originally-planned trajectory past Pluto is likely safe from dust.

Bill Dunford

Mars Express has been in flight for a decade, more than enough time to send home some amazing finds.

Emily Lakdawalla

Ten years ago, Spirit launched on a Delta II rocket toward Mars, and I was there to see it.

Emily Lakdawalla

Just some cool photos of Curiosity lighting up the Cumberland drill hole after sunset for a little nighttime science work.

Emily Lakdawalla

It's a big day for any space mission: the shipping of the spacecraft from its assembly facility to its launch facility. That happened for the next lunar mission, LADEE, on June 4, 2013.

Emily Lakdawalla

There was a Curiosity telephone conference this morning to make an exciting announcement: they're (almost) done at Glenelg and are preparing for the drive south to Mount Sharp. Allow me an editorial comment: finally!